Accidental Blogger

Poem Without a Name by John Ballard

In a few hours I'm having lunch with an old classmate whom I haven't seen for many years. So last night I was digging through a box of keepsakes from high school and college days and came across something I wrote in high school. 

I totally forgot about this poem. It is in my handwriting on notebook paper that I recognize. And as I typed it to make a digital record the scene became vaguely familiar, and reference to “the Chumbley place” meant that it had to have been a product of my imagination. Finally the odd words pinen and pecanen were the clues that made me remember. They were my own invention, made to match oaken as wood types. The characters were Sandra and her husband Cass. Together they spell Cassandra, a name that tells the future. 

Since there is no chance it will ever be published by anyone else, in the interest of vanity I'm publishing it myself.
I'm also vain enough to think it has held up pretty well after fifty years.

Chemo is Palliative, not Curative (John Ballard)

I'm not posting this just to make the day gloomier, only to help us all be well-informed. Misconceptions prevail because they make us feel better but a relective person feels stronger when better-informed. 

This brief message from Dr. Gawande should get more attention.
Take a moment to read the comments/ replies.

70+% of terminal cancer pts believe, wrongly, that they're on chemo to cure them. Who is to blame? Via @incidentalecon  goo.gl/fb/BVonY — Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) October 25, 2012

This feels like the flip side of yesterday’s post, where big effects were often found to be outliers. In this study, patients were asked about their expectations for chemotherapy for metastatic lung or colorectal cancer. The bad news is that these cancers have terrible prognoses. Chemotherapy is still the treatment of choice, but the effect we’re hoping for is an extension of life by weeks to months. Maybe you’ll see some relief of symptoms. But it’s not going to be curative. There are also, of course, significant side effects.

This NEJM report spells out some hard truths.

Chemotherapy for metastatic lung or colorectal cancer can prolong life by weeks or months and may provide palliation, but it is not curative.

[...]

Overall, 69% of patients with lung cancer and 81% of those with colorectal cancer did not report understanding that chemotherapy was not at all likely to cure their cancer.

[...]

Many patients receiving chemotherapy for incurable cancers may not understand that chemotherapy is unlikely to be curative, which could compromise their ability to make informed treatment decisions that are consonant with their preferences. Physicians may be able to improve patients' understanding, but this may come at the cost of patients' satisfaction with them.

Obamacare Will Survive (John Ballard)

Maggie Mahar sez...

Mitt Romney’s web site makes a bold promise: “On his first day in office, Mitt Romney will issue an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all 50 states. He will then work with Congress to repeal the full legislation as quickly as possible.”

Many of Romney’s supporters assume that this is what will happen if he wins. But in truth, even if Republicans take both the White House and the Senate, Romney wouldn’t have the power to “repeal the full legislation.” Nor could a new president grant waivers that would let states ignore the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We live in a nation ruled by law, not magic wands.

She refers readers to Dr. Timothy Jost and Health Affairs for the explanation.

There are no “Obamacare waivers” that could be issued by executive order. Section 1332 of the ACA permits “waivers for state innovation,” but these waivers, which only affect certain provisions of the law and can only be granted if specific substantive and procedural requirements are met, cannot be granted prior to January 1, 2017. Even in 2017, a state seeking a waiver would have to show that it had a plan to provide coverage that is at least as comprehensive and affordable and that covers at least as many people as the ACA (without increasing the deficit), not exactly what Governor Romney has in mind.

Legislation has been introduced in Congress that would accelerate these waivers to 2014, indeed President Obama announced support for such legislation, but it has gone nowhere. There are other provisions in the ACA permitting waivers or adjustments from specific requirements, such as waivers on the ban on annual dollar limits prior to 2014, but the time for granting these has already expired, and in any event they would have only a trivial effect on the law.

What about repeal? As every American remembers from middle-school civics, the president cannot unilaterally repeal a law. Under Article I of the Constitution, a bill must be passed by both the House and Senate and signed by the president to become law. This happened with the ACA, and the ACA remains the law of the land until it is repealed through this process. Under the Senate rules, a bill must pass the Senate by a three-fifths majority if it is filibustered, and an ACA repeal certainly would be. At this point in time, no one is predicting that the Republicans will pick up a 60 vote majority in the Senate, so repeal as such seems off the table.

This is also true for repeal and replace. Etc.

Lots more at the link for anybody who needs more evidence. There are likely a number of staff and support personnel who are more conversant with the minutiae of the law, but Dr. Jost followed the legislation from the outset and probably knows more about ACA than anybody in Congress. Whatever he says is solid as a rock.

He includes a concise summary of the Byrd Rule and how it acts as a constraint on Reconciliation. It should be remembered that ACA is a product of Reconciliation which opponents like to depict as some kind of parliamentary sleight of hand.

Budget reconciliation bills in the Senate are subject to the “Byrd rule,” which is in fact a federal statute. The Byrd rule allows any senator to raise a point of order objecting to any “extraneous provisions” in a reconciliation bill. If the Senate parliamentarian upholds the point of order, a three-fifths majority of the Senate is necessary for the provision to remain in the legislation.

As a reminder, the famous COBRA law (mandating employer-provided group insurance availability for six months following anyone's discharge from a job) is an acronym for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.

Of all the lies and promises that have come from the mouth of Mitt Romney, his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare is perhaps the most egregious and he knows it. (If he doesn't know it, we're in even worse shape than I thought.)

Malala Footnote (John Ballard)

Thanks to an ambitious international press, always eager to report feel-good "human interest" stories, most of the literate world now knows the story of Malala.  For anybody who may have been living in isolation for the last week or so, Angelina Jolie's We Are All Malala will get you up to speed. 

This comment left at that story deserves wider exposure. 

Ms. Jolie, in addition to Malala, perhaps the Nobel committee might want to consider two other girls named Shazia and Kainat, Malala's companions who when confronted by the Taliban thugs, refused to identify her, and were shot as well. Malala's story is an inspiration no doubt. But the selfless loyalty of her two friends, one of whom remains in critical condition fighting for her life, elevates this story to epic proportions, and defines the meaning of the phrase "I am Malala".

She includes a link to Dawn.

ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday inquired after the conditions of the two girls who were also injured during the attack on Malala Yousufzai — Shazia and Kainat, DawnNews reported.

The president moreover ordered the concerned authorities to ensure provision of medical treatment to both girls on the government’s behalf. He also summoned a report from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on the conditions of the two girls.

Spokesperson to President Zardari, Senator Farhatullah Babar said the president today enquired about the health of Shazia and Kainat and said the quest for knowledge of all these children despite threats had illumined the path for all.  

"They represented the true face of Pakistan, were a national asset and had raised collective national consciousness against the barbarism of militants and extremists," he said. President Zardari also prayed for the early recovery of Malala, Shazia and Kainat.

Malala Yousufzai was shot and seriously wounded on Tuesday as she was leaving her school in her hometown Mingora, in the Swat valley.

The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) later claimed responsibility for the attack saying she was pro-West and had opposed the Taliban. — DawnNews/APP

Presidential Debates

The Onion perspective :-)

 

If you like Campbell's Soup, you may also like Andy Warhol

Came across this article in the NYT about "art genome mapping." The idea is to create a massive data base of art through the ages which supposedly can analyze your artistic inclinations and direct you to works of art you may enjoy. Amazon has done this for years with books and Netflix does it with films and Pandora with music. Most internet sites selling things do the same to an extent. For some reason, I feel that the algorithm for predicting taste in visual art may be harder to crack than music and literature. We rarely can say what exactly catches our eye in a painting - the color, the composition, the subject matter, the light, the shadow, the reputation of the artist and sometimes even whether one comes across it in a tasteful museum setting or a roadside flea market. We can to a fair degree of accuracy say for ourselves or about others the *style* of artwork that could have an aesthetic appeal for a particular viewer but not a specific painting. I suppose the Art.sy project will be useful in putting a person in a particular artsy 'box' of sorts but I will wait to see how often its You may also like... recommendation hits the mark with art  browsers.

I have written a fair number of times here what I think about formulaic thinking about visual aesthetics. Here is an old post which may be relevant to Art.sy's analytic scope.  

United States of Starbucks (John Ballard)

I'm not sure what this means but it seems to be something of a milestone. 

I go to Starbucks from time to time, but there is apparently a subset of the population that virtually lives there. During the time I was in Korea I saw endless tearooms and met lots of Koreans, but can only recall being in someone's home very few times. The tearoom was the social equivalent to a living room. It was polite without being intrusive, and unlike Starbucks was often economical enough that even someone on a tight budget could pick up the tab.

I'm looking forward to a Starbucks that has table service and brings moist towels to refresh the weary customer, warm in cold weather and soothingly cool in the summer. 

Shooting Schoolgirls in the head for the glory of Islam (omar ali)

(Originally posted at brownpundits.com)

Many ideologies are dreadful but this one takes the cake (at least in this day and age). Malala's school van was stopped by 2 gunmen. They asked the driver to show them who Malala is. He said he couldnt show his girls to strangers (exact dialog uncertain, but something like that..brave man..btw, will codepink protest this use of patriarchal honor codes to try and protect a girl from terrorists? one wonders). One gunman asked the girls in the van. They looked towards Malala, he shot her in the head (and shot two other girls for good measure). Details here.

 

The Taliban have taken the time to explain why they shot her and how shooting a 14 year old girl as she comes home from school is the Islamic thing to do (argument from Quran and Hadith, with references):  https://www.facebook.com/boltapakistan1/posts/408721602528919

OK. I know about riots in India. I know child soldiers and suicide bombers were used by the Tamil Tigers. Thousands of Bengalis and Biharis and Punjabis and Balochis have died for Islam, Pakistan, Hindustan, whatever. MANY thousands more die of poverty, disease, malnutrition etc. Police beat up more people every day than the Taliban do. But in which case has a supposedly modern state failed for more than 10 years to even identify its enemies? Pakistan is a special case. That doesnt mean any of Zachary's posts about the great capitalist/IT/education/whatever success stories of Pakistan are wrong. Its still people. 200 million of them. Its a big economy. Its home to ancient cultures that developed many sound survival mechanisms, including our much maligned nepotism and pragmatic determination to help our kith and kin even when they have sinned. But the state ideology was confused and dangerous from day one and the elite's inability to change course has put more pressure on our ancient strengths than those ancient strengths can bear. The elite will have to wake up before its too late.

I think they will. But they will do it as late as possible. I want them to hurry up a little. Take a few short cuts instead of waiting for every bad idea to blow up in our face before we decide to dump it. Dont take my advice. Take Zachary's. But please, dont take Ahmed Qureshi's and Imran Khan's. Actually, even take Imran Khan's advice if thats the only way left. A number of Western commentators (especially journalists from cricketing nations; Bob Crilly, I am looking at you) seem to have decided that the poor retarded brown people cannot do any better and its Imran Khan or bust. Maybe they are right. White people sometimes are. Maybe he is exactly the kind of confused moron we need to put up as a distraction while the army changes course more thoroughly. Allah works in mysterious ways. But please, lets not have codepink visit us again for a few years. And if their need for street cred in NYC overwhelms them again, can we please send them to guard girls schools in FATA instead of making the poor souls suffer without toilets in SUVs on the bumpy road to Tank? I was going to say nasty things about our upperclass university pomo poco bullshitters as well, but better sense prevailed. It is our fault for paying attention to them. Let them discuss Humera Iqtedar's thesis (summarized with some creative license by history buff Shahid Saeed as: "TTP attacked b/c Malala promoting secularism. She is promoting secularism b/c of Taliban attacks. TTP secularizing public space" ) and let them congratulate each other and thrill to the applause of other equally Western educated members of the elite. More urgent problems deserve attention.

 

btw, here is the great white hope himself: Imran Khan on live with Talat. Watch near the end (36 minute mark onwards):

From "Innocence" to Mohammed Joyce by Omar Ali

Originally posted at 3qd.

Postscript: Today, 9th October, (afternoon in Pakistan) the Pakistani Taliban sent a gunman (or gunmen) to shoot a 14 year old girl who had become an icon of anti-Taliban resistance in her area after speaking up for female education. Yes, Codepink darlings on your way back from a faux protest march to Waziristan, education! NOT LGBT rights. NOT even complete gender equality. Just the right to go to school and aspire to a role in public life. She is now fighting for her life in a hospital. Another schoolgirl was also shot in the attack. There are reports that the driver of the school van was asked "who is Malala?"; he reportedly tried to stave them off by saying he couldn't identify girls for an outsider (Codepink may wish to protest this attempt to use patriarchal codes of female "honor" to save her life). Details are still murky. The story may change in some ways. But whatever the details, the Taliban's spokesman has called newspapers and proudly taken responsibility. She was shot for certain things she said and kept saying. That's it. She had done nothing else. She had not gone topless or thrown paint at a congressman or organized a little study circle of Tariq Ali's Trotskyite world resistance. She had, in short, committed no other crime even in the eyes of the Taliban. Inability to publicly say what you believe out of fear of this kind of violence is the ultimate restriction on free speech. I know it's too much to expect Codepink to have a clue, but others may wish to keep this in mind while reading this article. (Yes, I am picking on Codepink. In fact, I want to pick on most of the postcolonial-upperclass-university-retard crowd... I know they are mostly irrelevant, but I still want to pick on them, so there. I am probably putting my own happy relationship with the Pakistani super-elite at risk but sometimes you have to upset your friends.)

Potted Crow Recipe (John Ballard)

I found this recipe in our file. It may be useful sometime over the next few weeks. 
Note the date and notes at the end.
This recipe can be recycled one way or another after every election... 

Saturday, November 18, 2006

New recipe just in time for Thanksgiving: Potted Crow

For those who have been looking, either for themselves or to feed to someone else...Potted Crow

• 6 crows 
• 3 bacon slices 
• stuffing of your choice 
• 1 diced carrot 
• 1 diced onion
• chopped parsley 
• hot water or stock 
• 1/4 cup shortening 
• 1/4 cup flour
• buttered toast

Clean and dress crows; stuff and place them upright in stew-pan on the slices of bacon. Add the carrot, onion and a little parsley, and cover with boiling water or stock. Cover the pot and let simmer for 2-3 hours, or until tender, adding boiling water or stock when necessary.Make a sauce of the shortening and flour and 2 cups of the stock remaining in the pan. Serve each crow on a thin slice of moistened toast, and pour gravy over all.

**For future reference, the Democrats took the election, winning control of both houses of Congress, breaking a twelve year lock on all three branches. Lotta pundits eating crow now. With Bush a lame duck, the future looks good for Democrats. Of course they can snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory. It won't be the first time.

Sure enough, they did, four years later, midterm elections of 2010. Even having elected Barack Obama to the White House Democrats fell to a blistering loss of power in both houses.

 

Safdarjung Hospital -- A Study in Professional Pride (John Ballard)

I'm linking here a post from The Health Care Blog which reminds me of a conversation I had with our pediatrician when our children were born in the Seventies. Having selected what was then one of the metro area's best hospital, I mentioned casually that it seemed to be the best in town. He replied that yes, it was very good, but for any kind of neonatal complications Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital would be the place of choice. This surprised me because Grady was (and still is) the treatment center for indigents. But precisely because it is a "charity hospital" the volume of all types of trauma and complications gives the staff and support facility far more experience "practicing" medicine than most other hospitals. Other than TV programs and a limited time as an Army Medic in Korea in the Sixties, that is my only background regarding high-volume, low-budget hospitals. 

Pain After Death (John Ballard)

This was from Dr. Salwitz' post Friday. Go read the whole thing. He's an oncologist and knows more about death than most people. 

A poorly managed end-of-life experience can transform families for generations. I recently heard of a young man who suffered a miserable protracted death from cancer. This resulted in his wife becoming chronically depressed and isolated from her family. She committed suicide, leaving their son a life as an alcoholic and drug addict. The ripples from that one cancer spread out and, through the network of that family, caused pain for many more.

Thomas Jefferson's Tawdry Final Chapter (John Ballard)

I finally got around to reading the Smithsonian article, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson. I'm guilty of too much scanning of material, enough to catch the drift, without taking time to get mired in details that I will forget anyway. But this time I printed it out, some ten or so pages, and took time to let it sink in and it was a sad and disturbing experience.  

I already knew, as any good Liberal knows, that Jefferson was by no means the Godly Christian that Evangelical and Tea Party types like to paint. He had a personal copy of the Koran and was a student of scripture of all kinds. His intellect was mammoth. One commenter at the end of the article recalled John Kennedy's quip to a group of notables at a White House dinner that "there has never been a greater concentration of intellectual power here at the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone."  I also knew of the Jefferson Bible, his revision of the New Testament which not only attempted to reconcile the contradictions among the synoptic Gospels but meticulously removed the miracles as fables which he felt were invented by the original scribes, products of their superstitious imaginations. And of course the history and recent stories of Sally Hemmings are by now well-known to most readers.

Open Adoption and Other Matters (John Ballard)

Story Corps Atlanta aired a great audio snapshot this morning well worth the three and a half minutes it takes to listen. 

This summer and fall, 41 year old Atlanta attorney Kirsten Widner has been living with her biological son, Alex Locke, for the first time.

Alex is now 19 years old. He was adopted as an infant to the parents he calls Mom and Dad, and he grew up on the other side of the country. At StoryCorps Atlanta, Kirsten told Alex about her decision to put Alex in an open adoption, in which they’d still have the possibility of a relationship.

~~~~~§§§~~~~~

As I listened to yet another first-person account of how the idea of family has changed during our lifetime, I reflected on my own experience. Mine was a very traditional upbringing. Marriage on both sides meant "til death do you part" and I can't recall even whispers about anybody having to get married because they were "in trouble" (i.e. she got pregnant).  The oldest of my first cousins was the first person in the family to dare marry anyone who had been divorced, a woman with three children, and they never had any together. That was in the Fifties, and since then our family, like most, has come to terms with divorce and more, including gender orientation and racial differences. 

The difference between today's families and those of the past is more about facing realities that have always been there rather than discovering anything new. Attractions between cultural, religious and racial groups have always been around, and not always limited to young people either. The difference in today's global village is that we can no longer remain in denial because the numbers are simply too big. Those old bad apple and black sheep arguments no longer have credibility. 

Following my cousin's example, I married with a divorced woman with two children, one of whom had been adopted by her and her first husband, and we then had two more together, making a blended family of six. In the early years we were also licensed foster parents to several pre-adoptive newborns, one of which was a very promising little boy we hated parting with after more than a year when he was finally placed with his adoptive family. 

We persuaded the case workers to do adoptions from our home instead of the usual family services facilities which despite the toys and other stuff seemed too alien. It was a three-day process. The first day the adoptive parent came and met us as a family as well as the baby, and they spent as much time as possible with the baby. Second day any siblings came along and our two families spent a little time together, but the adoptive family might take the baby for a ride to have more time to bond. By the third day the baby would be going to a new home, not with total strangers but with people he had already known a little while. 

In the case of our last one we did the third day differently. We took our three girls out of school that day and delivered the baby to his new home where our kids played with their kids for a couple of hours before we left. In fact, they weny back once or twice later to visit before we lost touch. That baby would now be about thirty years old and we still think of him from time to time. 

In the meantime, there have been grandchildren and step-grandchildren as the next generation multiplied, with the most recent count being ten, with ages from a few weeks to twenty-six years. The two youngest, aged three and infant, are the result of assisted reproduction because our youngest daughter has no need for a man in her life but wanted to be a mother. She did her homework, found a clinic specializing in these matters, selected a donor from a veritable catalog of candidates, and became pregnant via IUI. Intrauterine insemination or implantation is not the same as in vitro fertilization which most people know about in that there is no deselecting of fertilized eggs. With IUI sperm is injected and timed to coordinate with the mother's natural ovulation cycle.

It's an exciting time to be alive. But it's also a challenge for those of us pushing seventy. When a single mom decides that her firstborn might feel cheated if she doesn't have a sibling, all you can do is pray that all goes well in their lives for the next decade or two. One of the hard lessons we all learn is that you can't tell your adult children how to live their lives. The reassuring part is that we get to watch the drama unfold daily on Facebook where there are literally scores of supportive online contacts, many of whom may never have known each other except on line. It turns out there is a voluntary online registry of siblings for parents who want to compare pictures and experiences! Our two youngest grandchildren (who have the same donor father, by the way, so they are true biological siblings) have at least forty-plus other half-siblings with the same donor/ father. (They are geographically widespread and the donor has been "retired" because the clinic restricts the number of donations from any one donor.)

Now you know why this morning's Story Corps feature caught my attention.  

Women Scrubbed from the IKEA Catalog, KSA Edition (John Ballard)

Stuff you come across on Twitter.

Ikea removed women from the directory in Saudi Arabia
Ikea has removed virtually all women from the pictures in the catalog company in Saudi Arabia.

In most other countries the Ikea catalog quite the same. But furniture giant has made sure to create a separate version for Saudi Arabia, writes the Swedish newspaper Metro.

Here are almost all women, many girls airbrushed away from the pictures. While directories in other countries have four designers at the front, there are only three in the Saudi edition. A female designer is removed from the picture.

In another picture a woman with earrings, bare feet and a small neck had become a man with black socks.

The arch-conservative and strict Muslim Saudi Arabia, women not allowed to drive or walk alone on the streets. The Swedish Trade Minister Ewa Björling think Ikea pictures is a sad example of how the country has "a long way to go" when it comes to gender equality.

This is what happens when corporate profitability collides with social norms. Before we too quickly look down our noses at IKEA it might be better to examine the impact of other less conspicuous corporate policies. Child labor and environmental pollution in other countries come to mind but I'm sure the list is much longer.